Sunday, December 18, 2005

D Squared

I just wanted to take a few moments to discuss Dunkin' Donuts. Growing up in the county that's the home of the yankees, Mets, and Red Sox (i.e. the part of New England--CT, RI, MA, NH, VT, ME--that's also part of the "tri-state area"--the parts of CT, NY, and NJ that are in the New York City TV market. Don't ask me what I have in common with people from northern Maine or central New Jersey, lifestyle-wise, but by default I was grouped in with both), I saw the "time to make the donuts" guy every day on my TV screen. Dunkin' Donuts was just another store. (Although, back then, it was a donut shop, as opposed to a caffeine dealer.) There are currently nine in the CT town I lived in for the last five years, before I moved to NYC. And even the town I grew up in, Ridgefield, CT, eventually got one, despite the town's laws which aren't very kind to chain stores with their (god forbid) colorful signage. That town could use some color, if you know what I mean.

Lately, I've come to realize that a lot of Bostonians seem to think that Dunkin' Donuts is a Boston thing. They even have a nickname for it: "Dunkies." (I'm still in shock over this. Like when I found out people from crazy-land, aka Pennsylvania, call 7-Eleven "Sev's." Ugggghhh.)

I realize that Dunkin' Donuts was indeed born in the Boston area. If Bostonians really want to claim it for their own, I guess they have that right. I'm just saying, it seems like more of a northeast thing to me, as opposed to just a Boston thing.

If you go to their website, and type in my zip code here in NYC, and set the store locator range to 15 miles, you'll find there are 283 "Dunkies" (are you really serious about that nickname? Do you just do it around me as some kind of prank?). There's one on my block. There's one on the next block, too.

Type in Fenway Park's zip code, and there are only 253 of them within its 15-mile radius.

I guess I'm just trying to stop the fighting between the cities, since I have connections to both. We should save it for the baseball diamond. Not likely, though, since both Bostonians and New Yorkers are stubborn. In fact, I'm twice as stubborn for having grown up in between. I still call Sports Guy "Boston Sports Guy," so I understand if you Bostonians want to keep thinking Dunkin' Donuts exists nowhere else but Boston. But if you really loved it, you'd set it free.

If you've ever been to RI, the DD factor is just about as ridiculous. Hell I live in a small town and there's 5 of them in my town. Two of them are right across teh street from each other(well one is in a Stop and Shop but still!) Considering my graduating class in high school was 118 divide that by 5 and you got like 20 students to a Dunkin Donuts or so....it's crazy, man.

He is right about Dunkin Donuts in RI. The franchise basically owns the state at this point. I think they must have some kind of deal where they get first dibbs on any abandoned property...and also non-abandoned property. I have twice found, coming home from school, beloved local businesses magically transformed into Dunkin Donutses (which are, themselves, now local and beloved). At this point there has got to be about one store for every 2 square miles in the state. You can basically drive in any direction along a somewhat busy road and get to a DD within 10 minutes. I have applied this principle twice in unfamiliar parts of RI, it's quite useful.

I thought people were kidding about the Dunkies thing too, and I was born and raised in MA. The thing that threw me off was that the some people who called it Dunkies were the ones who called their friends from back home in Swampscott their 'Swampies', a term which is both sickeningly cutesy and utterly loathsome.

So, yeah.

Now, if I want to caffienate at home over the summer, which evil should I go with: Carlyle-owned DD, or Starbucks? Cause either way apparently my not falling asleep on my morning commute is going to oppress someone.

Well I consider myself a Dunkin donut devotee - I even have their damned coffee shipped out to me here in California. It is not a particular obsession or anything - I am more of a creature of habit and frankly I don't like Starbucks or Peets or anything else out here so it is just as easy to have 3 pounds shipped each month and make at home.

I have never called it Dunkies - sounds like a dumb name. I never really thought it a Boston thing - remember the SNL skit "You can't get there from here" and one of the questions was how many DD were there on the drive from Hartford to Nahua (or something like that).

I will nitpick on the 280 versus 250. Don't you think a significantly greater portion of the approximately 706 square mile area covered by our search in Boston falls in the Atlantic ocean than the same area in NY? and also what about on a per capita basis.

Actually, if you narrow it down to 10 miles, the fenway zip code wins. I'm just saying it's about the same overall.

And there is a lot of water around manhattan, what with it being an island and all. You've got Long Island Sound and the Atlantic around us, too. Then again, nearby Brooklyn would be the fifth largest city in the U.S, per that sign on the Welcome Back, Kotter theme.

Also, I'd like to point out that writing about DD on a Red Sox blog and getting more comments about it than I've had on any other topic in recent memory kind of proves my point about it being a Boston thing. Wait, so it actually disproves my point. I don't know. Thanks for the interest either way, everybody.